Made in 1974 by Cyclone & Getty Pictures Corp and occasional director Jack Cardiff - more famous for his work as a cinematographer for the likes of Alfred Hitchcock and John Huston - 'The Mutations' (also known as 'Freakmaker') is the story of a mad scientist by the name of Professor Nolter (Donald Pleasence) who's attempting to create a plant / animal hybrid by feeding rabbits to a tree and by kidnapping and experimenting on his own students.  Helping him in these endeavours is  freak show owner Mr Lynch played, under heavy prosthetics, by Tom Baker in a very familiar looking outfit and who 2 months and 4 days on from the movie's release make his debut as The Doctor.

Truly it's a bit of a mess and really only composer Basil Kirchin who provides an often beautifully dissonant but also groovily jazzy and filmic score and the various cast members populating the freak show come out of the movie with their heads held high.  Pleasence and Baker are both reliable enough and the fabulous Jill Haworth ('The Haunted House of Horror', 'It!' & 'Tower of Evil') is reduced to a little more than a bit part with the leads being given to the woefully wooden Brad Harris and Julie Ege neither of whom have the charisma or the acting chops to carry the film.

Cardiff isn't much of a director and after a promising start the film begins to lag and the monster when it appears is hysterically bad but beyond the creature feature there's a rather lovely little riff on Tod Browning's masterpiece 'Freaks' that's bursting to get out but never quite manages too.

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A joint UK and Canadian production with links to the Amicus studios via producer Milton Subotsky, 'The Uncanny' is a portmanteau horror film where author Peter Cushing tries to convince publisher Ray Milland that cats are evil supernatural masterminds out to kill us all.

Cushing tells three stories starting with the best that finds greedy nephew (Simon Williams) plotting with his aunt's maid (Susan Penhaligon) to diddle her cats out of their inheritance.  It's a quick and easy little tale of the type studios like Amicus and Hammer could knock out in an afternoon filled with Kensington Gore and profoundly grisly endings for those involved.

The two Canadian stories share a far more North American aesthetic.  The second tale has a strong central performance from Katrina Holden Bronson as an orphaned child relocated to the home of her unpleasant aunt and her bratty bullying daughter that has borrowed it's effects from Land of the Giants but certainly doesn't scrimp on the brutal ending whereas the third is played far more for laughs as murderous cat hating thesp Donald Pleasence is made to pay for his crimes by his wife's vengeful cat.

'The Uncanny' was a flop on release, is still poorly regarded and was certainly made at least 10 years too late coming some 4 years after the shift to much more sophisticated horror with films such as The Exorcist and being released the same year as the big budget extravaganzas of Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind but personally I like it very much. My heart has always been in the B Movies and the schlock and this is very much both of those and let's be clear here the idea that cats are evil supernatural masterminds out to kill us all is undeniably plausible.

Buy it here - The Uncanny [1977] - or watch it below.



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Known - in the US - as Raw Meat this is a 1972 movie made by AIP and starring the brilliant Donald Pleasance as the cynical and tea obsessed Inspector Calhoun and the always watchable Norman Rossington as Detective Sergeant Rogers who are investigating the disappearance of a politician (James Cossins) from Russell Square tube station.  The pair are aided in their search by two students, Patricia (Sharon Gurney) and Alex (David Ladd), who were the last people to see him alive.  What they find are the two last surviving descendants of a colony of Victorian railway workers who had been abandoned in the tunnels after a cave in and had resorted to cannibalism.

As well as being an often pretty gory cannibalistic horror of the type that would become increasingly popular with horror directors as the decade wore on - The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Hills Have Eyes - Death Line also has at it's core an exploration of UK class and social structures with various tiers of British society coming into conflict; from Christopher Lee's cameo as threatening upper class MI5 agent, Stratton-Villiers, through the new, young, bohemian, middle class students, to the working class coppers and the under class of 'The Man' and 'The Woman' literally feeding on those above them.

Please don't start thinking of this as a po-faced piece of social drama it is a bitingly visceral and often very funny movie with Pleasance and Rossington in fine form and with Hugh Armstrong giving an astonishing performance as 'The Man' that instills weight and pathos on a character that could have been horrendously one dimensional in the wrong hands.

Death Line is a neglected and very much overlooked gem with some notable admirers, Guillermo del Toro and Edgar Wright amongst them, that deserves to be recognised as, if perhaps not a classic of the genre then certainly as an important (and hugely enjoyable) contribution and as a signifier of the direction horror cinema was going to head over the next decade or so.

Buy it here - Deathline AKA Raw Meat Full Uncut Version DVD REGION 2 Donald Pleasence Christopher Lee 1972 Horror DVD Death line - or watch it below.



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Broadcast in 1971 'The Horse of the Invisible' is so far the only live action adaptation of one of William Hope Hodgson's 'Thomas Carnacki' stories.

Created as an episode of the TV series 'The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes' a series which featured an adaptation of a different Holmes contemporary in each episode such as Guy Boothby's 'Simon Carne' and Emma Orczy's 'Polly Burton'.

In the story Carnacki (played by Donald Pleasence - forever beloved of Wyrd Britain for being the voice of the 'Dark and Lonely Water' public information film) is engaged by Captain Hisgins (Tony Steedman) to save his daughter, Mary (Michele Dotrice, who amassed an impressive Wyrd Britain pedigree in her early career) from the family curse, an invisible horse that begins to terrorise her on the night of her engagement.

Pleasence is, of course, excellent but personally I've always pictured Carnacki as a younger and more dynamic man so Pleasence's portrayal as a rather sedate, distracted and bookish character took a little getting used to.  The screenplay is faithful to the story and the ending looks every bit as daft in reality as I pictured it when I first read the story but you do get to see Carnacki's trademark electric pentacle in action (kind of).

It is a well-mannered and fairly placid example of early 70s TV that was obviously made on a pretty tight budget but the cast all throw themselves into the story and the end result is entirely enjoyable and makes one wonder why no one else has taken the opportunity to bring Carnacki to the screen.

Buy it here - The Rivals Of Sherlock Holmes - Series 1 [DVD] [1971] -  or watch it below.